Giuliano Galletta is an artist who suffers from a changeability of identity which leads him to ironically enact the professional roles he practices in life; he juxtaposes his photographic work, Il Divano Blu, solemnly framed as in a ritual, with the installation Barbie, in which the best-selling American doll-icon is inexorably drowned, confronting us mercilessly with a patent representation of his daytime theatre and a latent narrative of his night-time phantasies. There is a return of the theme of the Camera melodramatic of the house (Das Heim) that he constantly furnishes with his drives of desire, the phantasms of his fears, and the crude metaphors of housewifery: stories of eros, physical unease, death, but also a mirror of family evenings spent in front of the inevitable television screen. The tubs of a fantastical daily wash and the figure of the doll give a coating of real experience to the moving stage set of his theatre and become the mise en scène of his recurrent mise en abyme: the disquieting scenario of ambivalence, that is, of the tension between the presence and distance of the familiar, between the Heimliche and the Unheimliche (otherwise known as the feeling of the uncanny). In a recent exhibition that played on the effects of proximity, or rather of familiarity, he came to present a portrait of the artist as a boxer, replacing his own image with that of his father (as is clear from the dates: 1945-1995). This theatrical character comes out in his one-man show, in a particular modality that is suspended between Darstellung and Vorstellung, between the presentation of objects, words and images and the representation of an absent subject. His frequent use of quotations (Céline, Sollers, Sanguineti, Robbe-Grillet, Lacoue-Labarthe, De Pisis, Praz, Beckett, Kristeva, Santa Teresa d’Avila, Borges, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan) is a way of absenting himself as an individual artist and presenting himself instead as a trans-author, as a collective author, along shared lines of thought and aesthetic form; at the same time, it is also a literary style, a tribute to figures of thought, art, literature and poetry. A truthful autobiography is impracticable, not even starting from his work; there is no way it can be traced because it has been sprinkled in the interstices between word and image, between passages by others and aphorisms of his own, in a suspension of linear time that captures flashes of memory, leaps in time, in his invention of a photographic Bildungsroman, where the originality comes paradoxically from the reiteration of chance, the repeated reference to other authors. Even in his photographic portraits he wrongfoots the observer by putting on and taking off glasses, t-shirts and ties. Galletta is the author of a novel uninterrupted by an absent plot whose protagonist is the artist himself, duplicated in the mirror, a portrait next to a model, which provides him with a symbolic intravenous feed that compensates for the haemorrhaging of reality. He is a visual and acoustic poet who deploys the technique of situationist détournement and who constantly juxtaposes narrative and aphoristic micro-stories that reflect the unbridgeable gap which separates the desiring subject from the object of desire and which, from work to work, increasingly takes on the unequivocal semblance of melancholia.